Before the Great Famine popular political movements in Ireland had moved
between two different objectives: the repeal of the Act of Union, that is,
the establishment of limited self-government for Ireland and the
continuation of the Union. Legal, administrative, and political reforms,
undertaken in Britain, were to be swiftly introduced into Ireland. The
catastrophe of the Great Famine and the collapse of Daniel O’Connell’s
Repeal Movement in the late 1840s changed the direction of Irish politics.
More extreme nationalists in the Irish Republican Brotherhood (the Fenians)
sought a republic completely separate from Britain. Moderate political
movements in the 1850s and 1860s abandoned the objective of self-government
in favour of reform. Typical of moderate reformist nationalists was
Archbishop (later Cardinal) Paul Cullen (1803–78). Though quite
anti-English and anti-Protestant in attitude, he was pragmatic enough to
see that vital reforms, especially in education, could be won from
Westminster. He therefore supported Ireland’s continued membership of the
United Kingdom as the most likely means of speeding up the reform process,
which was well advanced by the late 1860s.

The new demand for self-government in the 1870s, called Home Rule, came
not from its traditional supporters in the moderate nationalist Catholic
community but from within the ranks of its long-time opponents, Irish
Protestants. The reason for this change was simple enough: Irish
Protestants distrusted the reforming tendencies of successive United
Kingdom governments, reforms that since the late 1820s had, in their view,
threatened to undermine the Union and the political and religious
safeguards, which it had given Irish Protestantism. A series of Acts
beginning with the Emancipation Act in 1829, brought reform in local
government, parliamentary representation, education, and land ownership.
The Disestablishment Act of 1869 broke the legal connection between Church
and State in Ireland and reduced the influence of the Protestant
ascendancy.

The response to this reforming process—‘too far, too fast’—was the
formation in 1870 of a new political movement, the Home Government
Association, by a small group of Irish Protestants. The principal persons
involved were George F. Shaw, a prominent fellow of Trinity College,
Dublin; Major Knox, editor and proprietor of the Irish Times (a Protestant
and Conservative newspaper at that time); E. R. King Harman from a leading
landlord family; and Isaac Butt, a prominent barrister and politician. They
feared that the values, structures, and heritage consolidated by the Union,
were being endangered by a weak-kneed United Kingdom parliament. The new
association aimed to preserve this political heritage by establishing a
determined Home Rule Protestant-led parliament in Dublin. Among its sixty
early members were Protestants and Catholics, landlords and tenants,
Conservatives, Liberals and Fenians.

But the Home Government Association did not want to see a return to the
pre–1800 situation of a Protestant ascendancy. Its leaders recognised that
the tide of reform was irreversible and that Irish Protestants must
accommodate themselves to changing ideas and situations. Indeed, they saw
in Home Rule the chance to reconcile Irish Protestantism with reform, and
ensure the continued role of Irish Protestants in Irish political
leadership. Among some of the Home Government Association’s leaders there
was a real sympathy for those in the separatist republican Fenian movement
who were most hostile to continued union with Britain.

Isaac Butt most clearly illustrated these complex and sometimes
contradictory motivations within the leadership of the Home Government
Association. In 1843 he had opposed Daniel O’Connell in a major debate in
the Dublin Corporation on the issue of Repeal of the Union. O’Connell was
impressed by the young Butt and he acknowledged Butt’s patriotism when he
declared “there goes Orange Young Ireland”. From 1852 to 1868 he had sat in
parliament as the Conservative representative of Youghal which, despite
progressive extensions of the franchise, remained one of the safest
strongholds of Protestantism and Conservatism among southern Irish
boroughs. Why did Butt become a leading light in this new drive for ‘Home
Government’? He certainly shared the unease felt by Irish Protestants at
the direction taken by government reform in Ireland from the late 1860s
onwards. Butt’s own financial mismanagement and gambling had left him
insecure: he needed to participate in some sort of public activity to
recoup his fortunes. What was equally important was that Butt (perhaps
initially for financial reasons) had become involved in the defence of
Fenian prisoners in the late 1860s and had come to believe quite sincerely
that changes in the political position of Ireland were essential. Political
reform might help stem the rising tide of militant separatism which had
encouraged young (and not so young) men to become involved in the Fenian
movement.

Fenian sympathisers began to give the Association guarded support and
behind-the-scenes agreements between the two groups were made at election
time. Then in 1873 the Home Government Association and the Catholic Church
moved closer as the latter’s initial hostility to the largely Protestant
make–up of the former gave way to the belief that the two sides needed one
another politically. In November 1873 a meeting between the two sides
(originally called for by Dr Keane, the Catholic bishop of Cloyne) was held
in Dublin and from it emerged a new body to replace the old Home Government
Association. This new organisation was the Home Rule League, a far larger
body than its predecessor, and one with considerably more political clout.

What gave this new body its strength was its pragmatism. Although its main
objective was the achievement of limited self-government for Ireland
through the re-establishment of a parliament in Dublin, its leaders
realised that a more practical programme was needed if the widest possible
popular support was to be gained. Thus, considerable emphasis was put on
the demand for a Catholic University to parallel the largely Protestant
Trinity College Dublin. This demand was geared particularly to win the
support of the Catholic bishops who had been campaigning for this for over
thirty years. It was also aimed at winning the support of the wealthy
Catholic middle classes who had benefited politically from the reforms of
the previous decades and who saw university education as a means of
furthering their children’s advancement. But the Home Rule League also
courted the farming classes by campaigning for agrarian reform, and it kept
links open with the Fenians by continuing to support the movement for
amnesty (or release) of Fenian prisoners. An attempt was made in 1878 to
bring the three distinct but overlapping groups of Fenians, Home Rulers and
campaigners for land reform together in a ‘New Departure’.

Butt’s political imagination and intuitive judgement were remarkable and
they enabled him to identify Home Rule as a national objective. The
majority of Irish people responded with clear enthusiasm to the idea of
Home Rule and were to promote it as a solution to the Irish question for
close on half a century. However, they had other pressing concerns. Isaac
Butt, though politically astute, lacked the drive, organisation, and
ruthlessness necessary to give the strong lead needed to turn a catch-all
movement into an effective political machine. The average supporter,
depending on social status, was interested in better employment, land
reform, or a Catholic University. Besides, there were tensions between the
constituent groups—tensions that threatened to wreck the fragile unity of
the movement from time to time. The Catholic Church, for instance, still
distrusted the Protestant element in the leadership. Urban working class
supporters of Home Rule had little time for the farming element that
appeared to be more interested in the practical issue of land reform. Above
all, there were tensions between the Fenians on the one hand, and the
Church and moderate Home Rulers on the other.

The other main problem was leadership. Butt was challenged by prominent
and up-coming members of the movement. Chief among these were the
obstructionists led initially by Joseph Gillis Biggar, a Fenian and member
of the Supreme Council of the IRB, and later by Charles Stewart Parnell.
Obstructionism involved holding up parliamentary business by making very
long speeches about minor issues, a technique that, as one historian put
it, would hasten the advent of Home Rule by goading the London parliament
into ‘wishing that the Irish had a parliament of their own’. Although
obstructionism was considered a most ungentlemanly technique, it certainly
succeeded in forcing the British public to take notice of Irish affairs and
of the Home Rule Association’s demands, and parliament was convinced that
there was an unresolved and bitter Irish question. It is said of Biggar
that no member of parliament with such poor qualifications ever occupied
more of the House’s time. It has also, however, been argued that Biggar’s
obstructionist activity made constitutional politics acceptable to many
physical force nationalists in Ireland.

The Obstructionists had their eyes on the leadership and began to
criticise Butt’s style and tactics. On its own, this challenge might not
have been serious, but coupled with the internal tensions and weaknesses in
the movement it meant that by the end of the 1870s the Home Rule movement
was about to shake off the old leadership and, much to the dismay of its
founders, become a powerful popular movement with a new charismatic figure
at its head.

Butt died 5 May 1879. His successor, William Shaw, a wealthy Protestant
banker from Cork, was elected chairman of the party. He proved to be an
undistinguished and short-term leader. The general election, March 1880,
was a triumph for Charles Stewart Parnell. He contested and won three seats
including Cork, which he chose to represent for the rest of his political
career. On 26 April 1880 Parnell was elected leader defeating Shaw by
twenty-three votes to eighteen. The displacement of Shaw led to a new stage
in the development of the Home Rule Party. Parnell was a far more pragmatic
politician than Butt and he was willing to use methods considered
unacceptable by Butt.

In reality, Parnell’s leadership style was quite authoritarian. He saw
himself as the ultimate authority in the party, he was frequently in
conflict with local party activists and, despite his democratic style, his
social attitude was elitist. Some historians argue that even his
participation in Home Rule politics, frequently ascribed to an
anti-Englishness inherited from his American mother and his own bad
experiences in an English public school, was really due to his belief that
his own landlord class should reclaim its rightful place in Irish political
and social leadership.

Parnell’s undoubted social elitism was matched by his political
shrewdness. He was pragmatic enough to make a most unlikely alliance for an
Irish Protestant landlord with the land agitation emerging in the West of
Ireland in late 1879 and which would spread rapidly through much of Ireland
over the following two years.

Even more significant in showing the pragmatism and the organisational
ability of Parnell was his formation of a highly centralised and
disciplined party, bound by a pledge which ensured that the individual
parliamentary representative was subject to the combined will of the party
and its leader. The Irish National League, formed in 1882, prioritised Home
Rule and put ‘land law reform’ in second place. The movement looked
democratic, as if its policies were shaped by the wishes of the wider
population. This impression was particularly cultivated in Parnell’s public
speeches when he visited the different parts of the country. He used
down-to-earth language; he tailored his words to appeal to all social
groups; and he made sure to meet personally with representatives of
different groups—farmers, trade unionists, and clergy—to hear their
grievances and opinions.

His other unlikely and very beneficial alliance was with the Catholic
clergy, a group for whom he had little natural liking. Both sides needed
one another. Parnell needed the local leadership and political know-how of
the Catholic clergy to spread the Home Rule organisation, particularly in
the rural areas. He needed the approval of the Irish hierarchy to put the
stamp of respectability on his politics. For their part, the Catholic
clergy and hierarchy needed the support of an astute and pragmatic
political leader who could push their demands in Westminster. This mutual
need was best expressed in the mid-1880s when an understanding was reached
between Parnell and the Irish Catholic bishops whereby the bishops agreed
to back the Home Rule campaign as long as Parnell pushed in parliament for
the establishment of a Catholic University as a counterbalance to the
Queen’s Colleges (in existence since the middle of the century) to whose
non-denominational character the bishops objected.

Parnell’s political career spanned the period from the late 1870s to 1890
and he succeeded in weaving together the twin causes of land reform and
Home Rule. He also kept the support of more hard-line nationalists in the
Irish Republican Brotherhood who had little time for either Home Rule or
land reform, but aimed ultimately to make Ireland a republic completely
separate from England. While Parnell did not necessarily agree with their
aims, he respected many of their leaders and, just as in his pragmatic
relationship with the land agitators and the Catholic clergy, he made sure
not to alienate any of them by condemning their methods or their
objectives. In one of his first speeches in Westminster in 1876 he defended
the Fenian ‘Manchester Martyrs’ and declared ‘I do not believe, and never
shall believe, that any murder was committed at Manchester’. Parnell
distanced himself from the Fenians after the Phoenix Park murders and as a
result their influence waned and they became a spent force for over twenty
years.

Parnell’s ability to keep so many unlikely allies on side explains to some
extent why he lasted so long as leader of the Home Rule Party. However,
Parnell’s private life brought about his ultimate downfall. He had a
longstanding affair with Katharine O’Shea, a married woman, with whom he
was deeply in love and with whom he had a family. The affair was not
completely secret, but neither was it common knowledge in the broadest
sense. It might have continued undisturbed had not Katharine O’Shea’s aunt
died, leaving her a considerable legacy from which her husband was
excluded. It was only at this point that her husband, Captain William Henry
O’Shea (possibly realising that he would get nothing from continuing to
turn a blind eye to the affair) made the matter public.

First, a large number of Liberal voters in England (whose party had,
despite internal conflict, supported Home Rule in 1886) demanded that the
Liberal leadership cut the links with the Home Rule Party unless Parnell
stepped down as leader. Realising that refusal could lead to a loss of
vital votes in the next election, the Liberal Party pressed Parnell to
resign. Finally, the Catholic Church and the majority of Parnell’s own Home
Rule Party now saw Parnell as a political liability whose continued
leadership of the Party might actually impede the achievement of Home Rule.
They called for his resignation. Parnell refused, and the Home Rule Party
and its supporters throughout Ireland split into two hostile groups, those
who wished to keep Parnell as leader, and those who condemned him for
betraying the Party, the country, and the cause of Home Rule. Parnell’s
affair with a married woman was most often cited as the cause of public
disillusionment, but equally important was Parnell’s refusal to resign as
leader. This refusal threatened to put his personal emotions and ambitions
before the objective of winning Home Rule.

Parnell died on 6 October 1891 in the middle of an electoral campaign. His
immediate legacy was a combination of romantic legend and bitter political
discord. An aura of tragic romance soon came to surround his memory. He was
presented by those who supported him at the time, and later by those who
came to came to despise the infighting in Irish politics in succeeding
decades, as a hero betrayed. The anniversary of his death was known as Ivy
Day, when solemn and emotive commemorative ceremonies took place. The sense
of tragedy, understandably exaggerated in the emotive atmosphere of the
time, entered the literature. The most notable examples are found in the
writings of Joyce and Yeats, where the legend of the betrayed ‘Chief’
greatly simplified the complex realities, and added Parnell’s name to a
long of list of perceived nationalist martyrs.

The word ‘forever’ appears several times in the 1800 Act of Union which
guaranteed permanent union between Ireland and Great Britain. Irish
loyalists, however, soon realised that lip service to permanency was very
different from reality. Most Irish loyalists had been very dubious about
any tampering with the Act of Union, and the almost immediate takeover of
the Home Rule movement by Catholics and nationalists confirmed their fears.
But it was in 1886 that their worst fears were realised when the First Home
Rule Bill came before parliament. This happened not only because the
movement in Ireland had become much more forceful under Parnell’s
leadership, but also because of two other developments.

Firstly, the changing of constituency boundaries and voting requirements
in 1884–5 resulted in a major expansion of the Irish electorate. It was
obvious that supporters of the new popular Home Rule movement were in
control of practically every constituency outside north-east Ulster. In the
election of 1885 it was only in the university constituency of Trinity
College Dublin and in the constituencies of north-east Ulster that
anti-Home Rule candidates were returned. Everywhere else fell to Home Rule
candidates, indicating long before the official partitioning of the island
in 1921–2 that there was a clear distinction between the anti-Home Rule
counties of north-east Ulster on the one hand and the rest of the island on
the other.

Secondly—and more importantly—Home Rule by the mid-1880s was supported not
only by a broad popular movement in Ireland, but also by important elements
within the United Kingdom parliament in London. These included the Irish
Home Rule representatives, the Liberal Prime Minister, William Ewart
Gladstone, and a large section of the Liberal party. For twenty-six years
after 1886, a series of consecutive Home Rule Bills (1886, 1892 and 1912)
threatened the Union. This was the first time that such a sustained
challenge had been faced, and it was significant that it was over this
period that Irish loyalists came to refer to themselves as ‘Unionists’,
supporters of the Act of Union in the face of threats from both popular and
parliamentary attack.

After Parnell’s fall, the Home Rule campaign continued and, though
divisions inside and outside parliament did the movement little good, this
did not prevent a second Home Rule Bill coming before parliament in 1892.
It was indicative of the growing acceptance of Home rule by United Kingdom
politicians that this time the Bill passed the Commons. It was rejected,
however, by the House of Lords (whose approval had to be given to any new
law) and this prevented it becoming law. The Liberal Party, which had
promoted the Bill, had by now come to regret its involvement with Home
Rule, not only because long and troublesome parliamentary manoeuvring had
ended in defeat, but because the party itself was seriously split on the
issue of Home Rule.

Indeed, the movement proved something of a poisoned chalice for any party,
individual, or administrator who took it up. This was clear again in the
first decade of the new century with the Devolution proposal of 1904 and
that of the Irish Council Bill in 1907. The idea behind these two proposals
was to reconcile Unionist and Home Rule demands by the establishment of a
new Irish assembly. It was hoped that this assembly would satisfy Home
Rulers by offering some degree of autonomy, but would reduce Unionist fears
since this autonomy would be far less extensive than that offered by Home
Rule. Needless to say, these measures, precisely because they were
compromises, pleased nobody. The London parliament was faced, as it had
been all through the nineteenth century, with the hopeless task of solving
the seemingly insoluble Irish problem, fulfilling demands for independence
while at the same time reassuring Irish Unionists that the Union would be
maintained.

In 1912, the last attempt was made to solve the problem before the
outbreak of the Great War threw all Europe into disarray. This was the
Third Home Rule Bill, which abandoned the compromises of 1904 and 1907 and
returned again to the idea of a Dublin-based parliament with extensive
internal powers. This time, the Bill not only passed the House of Commons
but, following rejection by the Lords as in 1892, it finally passed into
law due to the provisions of the Parliament Act of 1911. This Act had
finally broken the control of the Lords over legislation by stipulating
that any Bill which passed the Commons in three consecutive sessions would
automatically become law even if rejected by the House of Lords. Irish
Unionists were horrified: Home Rulers were euphoric. But then the war broke
out, and the application of the Home Rule legislation was deferred until
peace should return.

Unionists were a minority outside Ulster, and there was a sense in which
they gave up the struggle early on. Undermined by land reform and without
the backing of a large Protestant population and political supporters, they
could not campaign as effectively against Home Rule as Unionists in
north-east Ulster. There was a widening gulf between them and the Ulster
Unionists who, from the start of the Home Rule threat, formed a united
front to maintain the Union. In 1892 they staged a major demonstration in
Belfast, the Ulster Unionist Convention, allowing all classes to voice
their opposition to Home Rule. Following this Convention, a network of
Ulster Unionist Clubs was established to keep up the momentum, while in
1905 the Ulster Unionist Council further centralised its efforts. The very
titles of these organisations show how Ulster-based they were. Even at this
early stage the Unionists in the rest of the island were not only being
undermined by the Home Rule tendencies of the United Kingdom parliament,
but were also being abandoned by their fellow Unionists in north-east
Ulster.

A vital feature of Ulster Unionism during this anti-Home Rule period was
the way in which social and economic divisions were bridged by the common
commitment to defend the Union. This happened only in Ulster. In the other
three provinces Unionist farmers and workers had always been in a minority
and their numbers fell in the course of the nineteenth century. Thus most
Unionists were upper and middle class in the other three provinces. Ulster
was different. Here Unionism crossed the class divide: it included people
from all classes of society, landlords, substantial farmers, businessmen,
agricultural labourers, and urban manual workers.

The most determined action of the Ulster Unionists came with the Third
Home Rule Bill of 1912. Not only did the traditional organising and
speech-making take place, but there was a new emphasis on military
organisation. An Ulster Volunteer force was set up to fight Home Rule
should the Bill become law. Arms were imported, volunteer companies drilled
regularly, ambulance corps were organised by women, and there was even a
threat to withhold taxes should Home Rule become law. Much of this activity
was of dubious legality, particularly the arms importation and the threat
of non-payment of taxes. It seems ironic that a community priding itself on
its loyalty should treat the law so casually, but this in itself showed how
disillusioned Ulster Unionists had become with the London parliament which
had, they believed, betrayed them by supporting Home Rule. Their loyalty
was now ‘conditional’. They remained loyal on the condition the Government
supported the Union.

This conditional nature of their loyalty became clearer as a result of the
great public gesture staged in 1912 to underline Irish Unionist opposition
to Home Rule, the signing of the Solemn League and Covenant. This Solemn
League and Covenant was supported by Unionists from all over the country,
but most especially in Ulster. Men from the Unionist community, beginning
with the Ulster Unionist leaders, Edward Carson and James Craig, lined up
publicly and put their names to a pledge against Home Rule. The signing of
the Covenant had a four-fold significance. First, its main focus was on the
feelings of Ulster Unionists, emphasising that the Unionists in other parts
of Ireland (though they also signed the Covenant) were being slowly pushed
aside. Second, it stressed that Unionists believed that their community was
being betrayed by the parliament in London that should support them. Third,
it was well organised and the signing was orderly. In this way the
discipline and determination of Ulster Unionists were deliberately paraded
before their opponents throughout Ireland and Britain. Fourth, it
emphasised the religious crusading spirit that had always been part of
Unionism. This increased the determination of Ulster Unionists and raised
their campaign to a higher plane than mere politics. Ulster Unionists saw
themselves as defenders not only of the Union of 1800 but also of the
integrity of the entire British Empire. The outbreak of the Great War in
1914 turned their minds temporarily to European matters, and despite their
long-standing resentment of what they saw as Britain’s betrayal of their
community, they flocked enthusiastically to the war effort.

Home Rule envisaged the winning of a Dublin-based parliament with limited
powers, and the maintenance of Irish loyalty to the Crown. But just as Home
Rule was becoming more organised under Parnell’s leadership, more
fundamental questions began to be asked about what it meant to be Irish.
Was limited independence enough for those who believed Ireland capable of
self-government? Was more needed to prove Ireland’s distinctness from
England? Different answers to the question came from different sectors of
the island’s population and from different interest groups. During the
nineteenth century, for instance, the Catholic Church and a great
proportion of the population believed that to be truly Irish one must be
Catholic—a belief expressed in the support given to the campaign for a
Catholic University and echoing an Irish Catholic identity formed in crises
of the seventeenth century. Irish Unionists, on the other hand, especially
those in Ulster, were convinced that true Irishness involved maintenance of
the Act of Union. By the 1880s, however, new voices had joined the debate,
most coming from the increasingly well-educated lower middle class, men and
women whose interest in cultural and sporting pursuits was facilitated by
rising pay, shorter working hours, and the consequent development of
leisure time. These were well-educated young people who found their way to
advancement blocked by the somewhat stagnant social and economic structures
of the Ireland of their day—young clerks and shop assistants, caught in
moderately paid but dead-end jobs; national teachers forced to toe the line
by the local priest; and, above all, a new breed emerging in the late
nineteenth century, the junior civil servant who frequently spent time in
London and through this absence from home became more conscious of an Irish
identity. This was the social spectrum, which provided the main personnel
for the ‘new nationalism’ of the late nineteenth century.

People like these were instrumental in establishing and supporting new
organisations like the Gaelic Athletic Association (1884) to develop Gaelic
sports; the Gaelic League (1893) to foster the use of the Irish language;
and Sinn Féin (1905) which stressed economic self-reliance and political
self-sufficiency. Each in its own way, these new organisations stressed
that Irishness depended on cultural and economic distinctiveness from
England. They were not the first to put forward such a view. Forty years
earlier, Thomas Davis and the Young Ireland movement had promoted such
ideas, stressing the importance of self-reliance, praising the traditional
pastimes of ordinary Irish people, and urging the preservation of the
already dying Irish language. But Davis’s nationalism was balanced by the
fact that he was a Protestant, and his definition of Irishness was actually
quite broad, including all religious denominations and cultural groups in
the island. On the other hand, the form of Irishness propounded by the late
nineteenth-century movements was quite exclusive. Their main purpose was to
shape (or even invent) a national identity based on cultural
characteristics. The stress, as we have seen, was on all things Gaelic.
Hence the titles Gaelic Athletic Association and Gaelic League. If national
identity was essentially Gaelic, where did that leave the Anglo-Irish and
anglicised elements in the population? If one did not play Gaelic games,
dance Irish dances, sing Irish songs, speak the Irish language, was one
really Irish? If the answer to this question was ‘no’, then obviously the
emergent sense of Irishness was both exclusive and excluding.

This was the point at which Protestant Ireland (or at least some sections
of it) began to fight back, protesting that Irishness was not based
exclusively on any one religion or culture, and claiming that they had as
much right to be considered Irish as had any Gaelic games enthusiast or
Irish language revivalist. They stressed, instead, the common sense of
Irishness based on a shared past—often a very remote one in which figures
like Cúchulainn, Meadhbh and Fionn mac Cumhaill loomed large. They also
tried to identify Irishness in the simple, unvarnished life style of rural
Ireland—an Ireland that they studied in depth and with which, at one level,
they were very familiar, but from which they were separated by a wide
cultural gulf. Lady Gregory, for instance, though she knew, loved, and
wrote about the country people around her estate at Coole, really belonged
to a different world, that of the intelligentsia and the landlord class.
Similarly, when Synge wrote his controversial plays, including the Playboy
of the Western World and In the Shadow of the Glen, he was meticulously
careful to transmit the language and attitudes of the people to the page.
Probably even more importantly in terms of their impact on contemporary
society, these Irish Protestant writers found themselves at odds with those
who objected to their sometimes rather unflattering pictures of Irish life.
Dublin audiences, for instance, were outraged at parts of the Playboy,
seeing it (wrongly) as an attempt to ridicule Irish life. Too much realism
did not go down well at a time when many were trying to glorify and
romanticise Irish culture and values.

Some of the writers of Protestant Ireland, however, were themselves drawn
to this romanticisation of Ireland’s Gaelic culture and its past. In these
early years Yeats, who later cast a much more critical eye on Irish
society, set great store by Ireland’s mythological past, and by its
nationalist heroes. He recalled not only the glories of Meadhbh, Oisín and
Oscar, but also what he saw as the tragic heroism of Fenian leaders,
contrasting these qualities with the hard-nosed materialism of his own day.

One event, which helped to spread the myth of heroic tragedy outside the
confines of literary society and among the wider population, was the 1898
centenary of the 1798 rebellion. The original rebellion, which had been a
complex mixture of sectarian hatreds, imported French republican ideals,
and local power-struggles, was now portrayed as simple patriotic heroism in
the face of unbearable oppression. A rash of patriotic celebrations spread
across the island, particularly in those places (Wexford, Mayo and
Antrim-Down) where the rebellion had occurred a century earlier. Monuments
were erected to honour the rebels; old songs were re-written and new ones
composed to show the rebels off in their best colours; and new periodicals
like the Shan Van Vocht (published in Belfast) exhorted the people of 1898
to honour the memory of their forebears. The many local and regional
committees established to organise the celebrations represented a wide
spectrum of Irish society—trade unionists, Home Rule supporters, local
politicians, Catholic clergy and, very importantly, underground republican
activists and sympathisers who continued the Fenian/IRB tradition.

These latter-day republicans were disillusioned with the evident futility
of the Home Rule movement, in existence since 1870 but apparently as far as
ever from its goal almost thirty years later. They were also motivated by
the belief that political action (parliamentary debates, elections, and the
wheeling and dealing of political parties) was not only pointless but also
spineless. They saw the limited objective of Home Rule as being not worth
the effort, and in their quest for a separate republican Ireland they
glorified military action as the only courageous way ahead. In this they
were characteristic of the Europe of their day, where militaristic methods
were lauded in pursuit of both national and sectional objectives, from the
imperial programme of post-Bismarckian Germany to the Women’s Suffrage
movement in Britain and Ireland, to the Ulster Unionist campaign against
Home Rule.

Until the 1860s, a woman in the United Kingdom had very few rights. Irish
women, like their counterparts elsewhere in Britain, were classified
politically with ‘lunatics and criminals’ and were not allowed vote in
parliamentary elections or hold public office. A single woman could own
property but this passed to her husband upon marriage. Even her wages were
considered his and he alone had control over their children. Access to
higher education was extremely limited. A husband could also divorce his
wife more easily than a wife could divorce her husband.

The first Irish women’s suffrage association was the Dublin Women’s
Suffrage Society, founded in 1875. It later became the Irish Women’s
Suffrage and Local Government Association (IWSLGA). The organisation was
founded by two Quakers (a religion which had never differentiated between
the rights of men and women), Thomas Haslam (1825–1917) and Anna Haslam
(1829–1922), two of the most active feminists in nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Ireland. The IWSLGA was a non–militant association but
was to keep close links with the more militant suffrage organisations
during the high point of suffrage agitation in 1910–12.

About the same time a campaign to get better education for women began.
One of the leaders of the movement was Anne Jellico, born in Laois in 1823,
and a Quaker like many of the early campaigners for women’s rights. In 1861
she set up a Dublin branch of the British–based Society for Promoting the
Employment of Women to help working-class women train for jobs. In 1866 she
set up Alexandra College to train governesses and Alexandra School in 1873
to give girls a decent secondary education. It was pressure from Jellico
and from Scots–born suffragist and campaigner for women’s education,
Isabella Tod (1836–96), among others, which led the Government to include
girls’ education in the Intermediate Education Act (1878). Girls’ colleges
were set up to give women a university education and from the early 1880s
women graduated from the Royal University. In 1904 Trinity admitted women
to its degrees and in 1908, when the National University and Queen’s
University Belfast were set up, women entered on equal terms with men.

Better education gave women the confidence to become involved in politics.
When the Land League was banned, the Ladies’ Land League continued its
work. Anna Parnell, Charles’s sister, founded the Ladies’ League in January
1881. With 300 branches nationwide, the it organised resistance to
evictions and financial help for evicted tenants. The Catholic Archbishop
of Dublin, Cardinal McCabe, condemned the Ladies’ Land League for taking
women out of their proper place in the home. Several of the women were
arrested and sent to jail.

In 1896 women were allowed to become Poor Law Guardians for the first
time. Women were given the vote for local government elections in 1898. In
1899 eighty–five women were elected as Poor Law Guardians and thirty-five
were elected to district councils. These victories further aroused women’s
political awareness.

In 1900, when the aged Queen Victoria paid her last visit to Ireland, a
group of women led by the wealthy nationalist, Maud Gonne, and the Dublin
business woman, Jennie Wyse–Power, organised a counter–demonstration. They
followed this up by forming Inghinidhe na hÉireann (‘Daughters of
Ireland’), a nationalist organisation for women. They ran ‘buy Irish’
campaigns, held free classes for children in Irish, history and music,
organised céilís and put on small plays. The organisation was republican in
outlook but by 1914 it had faded away and was replaced by Cumann na mBan
(‘the League of Women’).

In 1908 Hannah Sheehy Skeffington and her husband Francis set up the Irish
Women’s Franchise League to campaign more vigorously than the IWSLGA had
done. The Franchise League held public meetings and demonstrations, lobbied
MPs and heckled political leaders, such as Dillon and Redmond, who were
determined that women should have no vote in elections for a Home Rule
parliament. Dillon argued that ‘women’s suffrage will, I believe, be the
ruin of our western civilisation’. Thirty-five Irish women were imprisoned
between 1912 and 1914 and several went on hunger strike. When the Liberal
Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, visited Dublin in 1912, two English
suffragists threw a hatchet at him.

Anna Haslam was also co–founder of the Women’s Liberal Unionist
Association, but worked side by side with nationalist and Catholic
suffragists in the early twentieth century. The IWSLGA and smaller local
suffrage societies were absorbed by Louie Bennett (1870–1956) and Helen
Chenevix in 1911 into the Irish Women’s Suffrage Federation. As secretary
of the Irish Women Worker’s Union, Bennett believed that a strong trade
union movement was essential for a thriving Labour Party. It was set up as
a sister organisation to the Irish Transport and General Workers Union with
Delia Larkin as its first general secretary. Presidents of the Federation
included Mary Hayden (1862–1942), while George Russell (Æ) (1867–1935) was
one of its vice–presidents. When the National University of Ireland was
founded, Hayden became the only woman on the Senate (1909–24). She was also
closely associated with the Gaelic League.

The Home Rule crisis of 1912–14 did great damage to the movement working
for female suffrage. Some women felt that winning Home Rule or preserving
the Union was much more important than winning the vote. Other women
believed that winning the vote was more important than either Home Rule or
the Union. As a result, the movement split and thereby lost much of its
force and energy. The outbreak of World War I changed everything. As the
armies recruited ever-increasing numbers of men, women had to take up jobs
outside the home and it was soon recognised that women’s work was vital if
victory was to be achieved.

Cumann na mBan was founded on 5 April 1914 as an auxiliary to the Irish
Volunteers. Unlike the Citizen Army, which accepted both sexes into its
ranks, Cumann na mBan’s role was strictly subordinate to that of the
Volunteers. They were to act as nurses, cooks, messengers, and fund raisers
but there was no question of their taking part in any fighting ‘except in
the last extremity’. Finally, under the Representation of the People Act,
1918, women over the age of thirty received the vote. Among the first women
to exercise the franchise was Anna Haslam at the age of eighty–nine.

Arthur Griffith provided the inspiration, the ideas, and the leadership
for Sinn Féin (‘We Ourselves’), a radical nationalist movement that
developed between 1905 and 1908. Under the direction of Arthur Griffith and
Bulmer Hobson, it absorbed varied small groups of nationalists, radicals,
feminists, and the politically discontented—the Dungannon Clubs (an
advanced nationalist group founded by Bulmer Hobson in 1905), the National
Council (formed by Griffith and Maud Gonne in 1903 to protest against
Edward VII’s visit to Dublin), Inghinidhe na hÉireann, Fenians,
disillusioned Home Rulers, and Griffith’s earlier organisation, Cumann na
nGaedheal, founded in 1900. Sinn Féin was the first Irish political party
to admit women as full members. The title, which was not new and was
frequently mistranslated as ‘Ourselves Alone’, was suggested to Griffith by
Mary Lambert Butler (Máire de Buitléir), a cousin of Edward Carson. The
first president was John Sweetman while Griffith and Hobson were
vice–presidents. Other prominent members included W.T. Cosgrave, Seán Mac
Diarmada, Countess Markievicz, and Seán T. O’Kelly. Sinn Féin’s original
concept of Irish independence was that of Dual Monarchy as suggested by
Griffith in his Resurrection of Hungary: a parallel for Ireland (1904).
Griffith hoped to win Unionists by keeping the King of England as King of
Ireland. This idea was based on the Hungarian solution within the
Austro-Hungarian Empire in the Ausgleich of 1867. This was very like the
system that existed in Ireland before the Union. In essence, Griffith cited
Grattan’s Parliament (1782–1800), which he idealised, as an model of
Ireland’s legislative independence.

The movement had a newspaper, Sinn Féin, edited by Griffith from 1906
until its suppression in 1914. The Sinn Féin economic policy of 1908 was
largely influenced by the theories of Friedrich List who argued that
nationalism was essential for economic growth. Griffith’s policies included
the

‘establishment of protection for Irish industry and commerce by
combined action of the County Councils and Local Boards; development of …
mineral resources; creation of a national civil service; national control
and management of transport and of waste lands; reform of education;
non-consumption as far as possible of articles requiring duty to the
British Exchequer; non-recognition of the British parliament’.

His main
political proposal, which was not original, was that Irish MPs should
withdraw from the British Parliament, as the Hungarian MPs withdrew from
Vienna.

In Griffith’s words:

‘Our declared object was to make England take
one hand from Ireland’s throat and the other out of Ireland’s pocket’.

These policies, however, had little initial impact as was shown by the
North Leitrim by–election of 21 February 1908 when Charles J. Dolan, having
resigned his membership of the Irish Parliamentary Party, contested the
seat for Sinn Féin and got only one–third of the total poll. However, Sinn
Féin provided a focal point for fringe movements, and had a
disproportionate influence on political thinking, particularly through the
writings of Griffith. By 1908 the party had 100 branches throughout the
country.

Although Dolan’s votes were probably a ‘thank you’ from former supporters
rather than an endorsement of Sinn Féin policies, Griffith believed there
was widespread support for his ideas and he decided to encourage them by
turning his weekly newspaper, Sinn Féin, into a daily. The venture failed.
Quarrels developed in the movement and its membership began to decline. The
more radical members of the party accused Griffith of diluting the party’s
nationalism in order to make it more acceptable to Unionists and Home
Rulers. In 1910 the constitutional crisis in Britain made it seem as though
Home Rule would soon be a reality. The Home Rule party was revitalised
while Sinn Féin declined. Finally, the revival of the IRB made some of
Griffith’s young followers impatient with his pacifism. They set up a rival
newspaper, Irish Freedom, which took many of Griffith’s readers. All this
left Griffith on the verge of bankruptcy.

However, the Third Home Rule Bill disappointed most nationalists and, when
John Redmond showed that he was not able to deal with Unionists, there was
some revival of interest in Sinn Féin but that interest was in the idea
rather than the organisation. By this time, the Sinn Féin party had shrunk
to a single unit, the Dublin Central branch. However, many nationalists
began to describe themselves as ‘Sinn Féiners’ and the more nationalistic
members of the Irish Volunteers called themselves ‘Sinn Féin Volunteers’.
The organisation had almost disappeared by 1914 although Griffith still
published Sinn Féin on an occasional basis. Over the next few years he
would continue to preach his ideas to an apparently indifferent world.

The Irish Volunteers were founded on 25 November 1913 following the
publication of an article by Eoin MacNeill in An Claideamh Soluis, the
official organ of the Gaelic League. In that article of 1 November,
entitled ‘The North Began’, MacNeill suggested that southern nationalists
should form a volunteer movement on the lines of the Ulster Volunteer
Force. MacNeill was then approached by Bulmer Hobson of the Irish
Republican Brotherhood who organised a public meeting at the Rotunda where
the new force was established. Thus, reacting to the establishment of the
Ulster Volunteers in January 1913, Irish republicans joined with the more
moderate supporters of Home Rule in open recourse to arms to establish the
Irish Volunteers.

Although branches were set up throughout the country, the initial response
was strongest in the North. It attracted followers of Sinn Féin and the
Gaelic League as well as members of the IRB who, however, had their own
views about the future of the new force. This heavy IRB involvement in its
foundation made John Redmond hesitant to support it. By 1914 membership was
around 80,000 and funds were collected through John Devoy and Clan na Gael
in the USA and by Sir Roger Casement and Alice Stopford Green in England.
In July 1914 Darrell Figgis and Robert Erskine Childers arranged for the
purchase of guns in Germany. Some 1,500 rifles and 45,000 rounds of
ammunition were shipped from Hamburg to Howth on board Childers’s yacht
Asgard on 26 July. They were quickly distributed to waiting Volunteers who
managed to escape with them before a force of police and troops arrived to
intercept them. The event subsequently became known as the ‘Howth
gun–running’.

There were now two armed volunteer armies in the country. The Ulster
Volunteer Force had made clear its commitment to resist Home Rule at all
costs, and had been given the support of Andrew Bonar Law and the
Conservatives. John Redmond was fighting for Home Rule without partition at
Westminster but he was concerned lest the Volunteers should prevent the
passage of the (third) Home Rule Bill. To ensure control of them he
demanded half of the seats on the Provisional Committee. As the alternative
was to split the movement, his demands were conceded in June, much to the
anger of the extremists in the IRB. The Home Rule Act was to become law on
14 September 1914.

However, the outbreak of war in August 1914 meant that the Home Rule Act
was suspended for the duration of the war. There were now 180,000 Irish
Volunteers. The British Government rejected Redmond’s offer that they
should act as a defence force for Ireland. On 20 September, in the course
of a speech at Woodenbridge, Co. Wicklow, Redmond urged Volunteers to
support Britain in the war against Germany ‘for the freedom of small
nations’. His call was answered by a majority who became known as the
National Volunteers, leaving some 11,000 Irish Volunteers, who opposed
involvement in the war. This minority reorganised in October 1914. Eoin
MacNeill became Chief of Staff, Bulmer Hobson Quartermaster, and Michael
Joseph O’Rahilly Director of Arms. Three key posts were in the hands of the
IRB: Patrick Pearse was Director of Military Operations; Joseph Plunkett
Director of Military Operations and Thomas Mac Donagh Director of Training.
All three later became members of the secret IRB Military Council which
organised, under the influence of Thomas J. Clarke, the Easter Rising of
1916. The huge number who followed Redmond is testament to the influence
that he and Home Rule exerted over most Irish people.

Most of those who joined the Volunteer movement saw their primary
objective not as the achievement of an Irish republic but the defence of
Home Rule against Ulster opposition. Some accepted Ireland’s close
relationship with Great Britain which, in the tense international
atmosphere of the time, was seen as the defender of liberty. Many of the
young men in the Volunteers were also attracted by the adventure and
excitement of war and by the pay packages they would earn. Some historians
have argued that Redmond was under great pressure from Volunteers to make
the declaration he made at Woodenbridge and that he could not have
prevented most of them from signing up for the war in any case. When the
First World War broke out most Irish Volunteers flocked to the war effort
as enthusiastically as did the Ulster Volunteers and were backed by the
leaders of the Home Rule movement. Home Rule was shelved until peace should
return, as it did in November 1918. By then the tenor of Irish politics had
changed beyond recognition.